Borderlands Pre Sequel Ol Painful

[Ermengardi Atkisson]

Ifit's hard to imagine how and L.A.-born blues-influenced slide guitar maverick like Ry Cooder wound up on a Caribbean island jamming with the senior elite of Latin romantic music, it's just as hard, at first glance, to figure out how European master filmmaker and New German Cienema vanguardist Wim Wenders wound up on the same isle.

But, like Cooder's long, winding quest for musical and cultural meaning, Wenders has long been a peripatetic soul as well. Born in Germany at the close of World War II (Dusseldorf, 1945), Wenders belongs to the European generation whose parents lived the conflict, and that experienced in its formative years both a painful coming-to-terms and the birth of the Cold War. And while Wenders clearly shares with other artists of his generation the existentialist world view of mid-20th century Europe, he also early on felt the profound post-war influence of American pop.

In many ways, Wenders is as much a "borderlands" creature as Cooder. A fiercely independent filmmaker (he often produces as well as directs and scripts his own projects), his films do not read quite as obviously "European" as the efforts of many of his peers, but they certainly don't inhabit the realm of classic Hollywood, either. Indicative of his conflictive relationship with the American film industry, he came to America in 1978 on contract to direct a film (Hammet) for Francis Ford Coppola; after a series of disputes over the project, only 30 percent of Wenders' shooting made the final cut.

One of Wenders biggest critical achievements, Wings of Desire (1988), was also a relative commercial success in America, but it is the lesser-known Paris, Texas (1984, his first collaboration with Cooder) that best sums up his hybrid, Euro-American sensibility. Starring critically-acclaimed character actor Harry Dean Stanton and Natasha Kinski in a role that softened her European lisp into a healthy Texan drawl, their characters-on the road, on the run from themselves and their pasts-could represent a lonely search for meaning on either the European or American sides of the Atlantic.

In the end, Wenders, is no radical existentialist. Paris, Texas allows a tender reunion between its drifter-characters, a brief catharsis that cleanses the wounds of their pasts before they must embark on uncertain futures. Here, and especially in Wings of Desire, Wenders achieves a visual and narrative poetry-a bittersweet kind of yearning.

Although best known for his feature films, Wenders is also an accomplished documentarian. A gem of a film is his moving Lightning Over Water (1980), a collaboration with the legendary Nicholas Ray (director of such American classics as Rebel Without a Cause and Johnny Guitar). Originally conceived by the ailing Ray as a work of fiction, Wenders wound up shooting a deathbed documentary. The finished product is an ode to Wenders' mentor, as well as a pondering of the nature of story, film, and of life's great, unrequited desires.

And so it was with a sensibility for the lyrical and the futile, for absurdity and evil-and most of all, perhaps, with a deep knowledge of how brief and precious moments of redemption are on the long roads that individuals travel -- that Wenders turned to The Buena Vista Social Club.

The tone here is elegiac-fitting for an ode to elders who've suffered in invisibility-indeed, ignominy-for so long. It is also a film whose visual style draws upon Wenders deeply lyrical eye. Nostalgic, nearly black-and-white tones are disrupted by the effusive color of the Caribbean -- and, of course, by the music itself. In the end, the story of these great musicians is simultaneously sad and uplifting. Despite the celebration of the rediscovery of their artistry, we can't help but be reminded that were it not for the trickster-gods of geo-politics (Cold War characters on all sides), these geniuses of a time-honored genre would probably have received their due in their prime.

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